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Topic: Inappropriate ads - how to handle? (Read 4274 times)

My 3-year-old child was playing a game on my husband's iPad. I don't want to pinpoint the game, but something like decorating cupcakes. Very much for young children. She clicked on an ad within the game and wanted that game too. My husband looked at the game that was advertised on the cupcake game, and it was something along the lines of playing a mafia hitman and killing people. Very violent images.

Does this cupcake game company likely have control over what ads are shown in the game? I want to complain to someone but maybe it's pointless.

Find out the company that makes the cupcake game, and send them an email telling them what you told us. Most companies will want to know about this sort of thing, because they can easily sculpt the ads so that kid's games get ads that just show a guy in a pinstripe suit and fedora while "Zombie Killer 5" will show the blood-splattered Mafia hit ads. It won't help the "Mommy I want..." stuff but it'll cut down on the imagery at least.

My 3-year-old child was playing a game on my husband's iPad. I don't want to pinpoint the game, but something like decorating cupcakes. Very much for young children. She clicked on an ad within the game and wanted that game too. My husband looked at the game that was advertised on the cupcake game, and it was something along the lines of playing a mafia hitman and killing people. Very violent images.

Does this cupcake game company likely have control over what ads are shown in the game? I want to complain to someone but maybe it's pointless.

When you say "Very much for young children," do you mean it's very appropriate for young children or that it's explicitly marketed as a children's game? If it's not explicitly marketed as a children's game, I would carefully look over any game or website terms of use you may have agreed to before contacting the company and mentioning that your child plays. They may very well have stated a minimum age limit for using the website/game. If it's a facebook game, for instance, no one under 13 years old is allowed to have an account, so complaining that the ads are inappropriate for a 3-year-old player is unlikely to make much impact.

Either way, you can contact the company with your concerns. However, unless the game is explicitly marketed for young children, I wouldn't get my hopes up too much about their response. If there is anything in the terms of service about an age limit, then I would also avoid stating that your 3-year-old uses the game, and limit your complaint to the fact that you don't want to see violent imagery when playing a cupcake game, especially when your children are around.

Is it Cupcake Maker? If so, that's Sunstorm Interactive and almost all of their games are specifically targeted toward children. They have a couple of apps out of a few dozen that are shoot 'em up type games targeted to an older audience so they were probably cross-promoting.

If it was truly an ad and not a cross-promotion, a mistake could have been made when the ad was being delivered. Either way, it can't hurt to drop the company a line and point it out, because they don't want out-of-context ads that hurt their business.

I am joking actually. It's your kid and you can do what you want. But that would be my solution.

For one thing, most iPads are worth a lot less than $800 (we paid about a quarter of that for ours) and for another, iPads are pretty darn indestructible. Ours survived Babybartfast jumping on it with both feet. (She got in serious trouble for that, but it's good to know it can take a 30-pound toddler jumping.)

It can be difficult to find free toddler-appropriate apps - Babybartfast1 seems to be a master at going from playing a game one minute to reading my Twitter stream the next, because the game popped up an ad that linked to a youtube video that linked to their Twitter account